Reelix's place to mess around, and really do as he pleases.... Really :p

Saturday, October 29, 2016

C# - Finding the Median value of a List

I love using Lists in C#. Unfortunately, the List class lacks some functionality - Like finding the median value in a set.

Definition: The median is the value separating the higher half of a data sample, a population, or a probability distribution, from the lower half. In simple terms, it may be thought of as the "middle" value of a data set. For example, in the data set {1, 3, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9}, the median is 6, the fourth number in the sample. The median is a commonly used measure of the properties of a data set in statistics and probability theory.

Examples:

1.) If there is an odd number of numbers, the middle one is picked. For example, consider the set of numbers:

1, 3, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9

This set contains seven numbers. The median is the fourth of them, which is 6.

2.) In the data set:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9

The median is the mean of the middle two numbers: this is (4 + 5) ÷ 2, which is 4.5.
- Median on Wikipedia